Our Legislative Scorecard has been a huge success. Over ten thousand people visit the website each month and one beltway newspaper called it a "hugely influential cheat sheet for determining conservative bona fides in Congress."
We are launching a new version of the website today. The site has all of the same essential scores, but it presented more information and has more tools, all designed to help conservatives hold Congress accountable.
Read more to see some the of the changes and what's coming next.
After seeing the massive response to our scorecard 1.0 website, we started asking conservative activists what we could do on the site to help their activities. After numerous phone calls, surveys, and white-boarding sessions, a few things became clear. Our scorecard needed:
- More background information, so people could speak knowledgeably on the issues reflected in our scores.
- Better contextual information. People wanted to know what the average was and how we did the math to compute the score.
- More ways to use the information, including better print functions and embedding scores in other sites.
After listening to that feedback, we executed a detailed plan to reach those goals. Today we announced a major update to the scorecard website, making it bigger, better, and more informative.
Here are some of the key updates:
- For every vote and bill on the scorecard, we summarized what the policy would have done and what our position was. We also are reporting the vote results and provide a link to our original key vote alert.
- On the pages for each Member of Congress, we expanded the room allocated to bill and vote descriptions, so that when you print the page there's more explanation of each decision the Member of Congress made.
- On the pages for each Member of Congress, we included a summary of the formula that enables us to include votes and co-sponsorships in the final score. We also added the Chamber and Party average, so you can easily see how your Member of Congress is doing in relation to his or her colleagues.
- The biggest new feature is the Watchlist, a place where you can assemble your own list of Members of Congress you'd like to track.
With these updates you will find a more informative and functional legislative scorecard. It's all designed to help you hold your Member of Congress accountable and support the real conservatives on Capitol Hill. What's on tap next? We're pushing hard to make the entire scorecard site mobile-friendly, so you can check your Member's score on the go and use our real-time information to hold them accountable!
As always, let us know if you notice any bugs in the new site or have an idea for an improvement.